


No Gods or Heroes

by Shinybug



Series: The Panic Room [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Blood, Dark, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Post-Hogwarts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-16
Updated: 2011-08-16
Packaged: 2017-10-22 16:28:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/240085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shinybug/pseuds/Shinybug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Pariah, rhymes with Messiah,</em> Hermione thought, and the words rattled around her brain like pennies in a jar, making a little song.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Gods or Heroes

**Author's Note:**

> Third and final part of The Panic Room series. Sequel to Already Dead and Not Against My Will, set post-Hogwarts, not DH compliant. This series is complete. See end notes for warnings clarification.

*~*~*~*

Three years.

Three years since she saw him last, and now here they were, face to face. And of course it had to be here, and now, on this battlefield, with the ruined, smoking rubble of Hogwarts Castle behind them and the bodies of loved ones strewn between them like so many leaves fallen from winter-starved trees.

Around them, nearby, aurors were tallying the dead and apprehending the last living remnants of Voldemort's army. There were cries and terrible moans from the injured, and from those searching the field for family, friends, anything left to let them know that good had really won.

There wasn't much.

Hermione knew she should be doing something, probably something official and Ministry related, but for the life of her she couldn't recall what it was. All she knew was that her boots were stuck in thick mud, and the blood of those she'd killed and those who had died in her arms ( _don't think about them--don't remember their names--harryronlunaginnyremus--no, forget--forget_ ) had painted her robes rust-colored and made sticky her cheeks and hands.

And he was there, and she couldn't take her eyes off of him, and he looked more wraith than savior but he was the only good thing she could see in her whole field of vision, which seemed much wider and deeper now than it had mere hours ago. The aurors were giving him wide berth, recognizing that the war would not have been won without Severus Snape, but wary of calling him ally even now.

 _Pariah, rhymes with Messiah,_ Hermione thought, and the words rattled around her brain like pennies in a jar, making a little song.

He was slipping off his hood and Death Eater robes for the last time like a snake shedding its skin, letting them pool around his feet, his simple charcoal robes underneath looking too clean amidst so much gore and ruin. His expression was one she'd never seen before, and seemed terrible somehow. It looked like relief, unmuddied by sorrow or regret.

There was something warm trickling down her face and she thought at first it was blood, but it tasted like tears and Hermione opened her mouth and raised her face to the thick gray sky, waiting for rain, or snow. Leaves were shaking loose from the trees, and there were dragons still overhead, nearby somewhere.

When he took her shoulders in his hands and caught her to him she startled, wondering how he'd crossed the field so quickly, then thought perhaps he'd been beside her the whole time. Someone was making horrible noises nearby, an awful keening, gasping wail, muffled by wool.

It might have been her.

Hermione heard other voices now, spinning around her like circling ravens calling in outrage or warning. She pressed her face to the immaculate wool of Snape's robes and willed them all to go away, wishing she knew the words of a spell that could make everyone disappear, everyone in the whole world. Wash it all clean.

Snape's low voice rumbled against her ear but she didn't try to decipher his words. Then all sound stopped, ravens wheeling away, and she was lifted into arms much stronger than they looked. Suddenly weightless, she stopped wailing and the silence echoed in her head. She didn't care where he was taking her, as long as it was away from this bloody field of open graves.

She felt them descend into the earth, steps echoing oddly as the wind rushed past them, and suddenly Hermione knew where they were going. She opened her eyes when Snape set her down on a huge chunk of limestone rubble that had once supported the walls of Hogwarts Castle.

The Panic Room was not so much a room anymore, it was a shell, a suggestion of something that used to be, and Hermione guessed she only was able to recognize it because it had featured in her nightmares and dreams for so many years. What had been deep inside the bowels of the dungeons was now exposed to the outside air high above them, so much of the castle having been ripped away by magic and giants and dragons that were even now being rounded up by Aurors, cries occasionally piercing the air. Dusty silver light filtered down through the jagged rips in the stone above, illuminating the floor around them like a shattered mosaic of rubble and finery.

Snape was crouching before her, holding her hands in his. His expression was solemn but still unfit for a funeral. "I told you. I tried to tell you. You should have left before all of this, long ago when you had the chance."

She swallowed hard, squeezing his hands in hers to feel the resistance of his bones. "I couldn't abandon them. It was just as much my fight as it was theirs." Her breath snagged suddenly and she choked on it. "If I could find the Time Turner, maybe I could--"

Snape was shaking his head, for the first time looking almost angry. "And if you did, what then? Would you cheat death the way the Dark Lord did? There must be a balance, and we've worked so hard to restore it. Lives are lost in war, I told you. This is the price we all had to pay."

"I don't deserve to live any more than they deserved to die."

"Child," Snape said, closing his eyes briefly, as though he was trying to speak to the young Hermione in his memory. "It's not about deserving. I fully intended to die today, and it wasn't for lack of trying that I didn't. Let it be enough that we've won, after everything."

Hermione tipped her face up to feel soft flakes of snow like faerie kisses falling through what was left of the castle to cool her skin. "But they're all gone, all of them. How can you say we've won, when we've lost everything?"

"You're still here, aren't you? That's more than enough for me," Snape said, and Hermione's eyes flew to meet his, wondering and startled. In that quick, split-second glance before his face shuttered closed again, she thought she recognized hope there, such an unfamiliar expression that she was sure she had imagined it. But no, even through his impassive layers she could see what was different about him--he appeared to have shed years of his life the way he'd shrugged out of his Death Eater robes. She saw him as he was once, long ago--a young man who held all the possibilities of the world in his hands, and though he could never buy those years back truly, he could borrow them, and remember.

There was blood on her hands and on his, and it was so achingly familiar and terrible and intimate, here in the ruins of his old haven that Hermione pulled him forward with a sharp tug on his hands and he came to her, looking not at all surprised. She put her hands on his cheeks and held him here and kissed him, remembering her foolish attempt years ago, her clumsy childlike desire. She tried not to think of the intervening years and experiences with people who lay above ground now with sheets over their staring eyes, and simply let herself feel the mouth on hers with the appreciation of maturity and self-possession she hadn't had before.

And Snape felt different too, less angry and more relieved, like maybe he'd been thinking about her too and waiting for the world to flip itself over, for the years to pass and make it less an abomination, for the words teacher and student to mean absolutely nothing anymore in the face of much more important things. His hands, pulling her hips forward and settling her against him to straddle his lap, felt sure and steady.

In her head she had imagined much different circumstances than these. Sometimes she had envisioned him knocking on her front door, normal as Ron ( _don't think about him_ ) arriving for a date, one day out of the blue. She imagined letting him in, surprised and welcoming. She imagined the clean sheets beneath them, the air smelling like candles and incense, his hands reverent and gentle.

But that wasn't what they had together, never had and never would. His hands were beneath her robes, unfastening her jeans and urging her to wriggle out of them, and then he was doing something filthy and complicated and fantastic to her body with his fingers and her blood caught a spark and ran like wildfire. She shouted out her surprise and her voice echoed up the clumsily stacked foundations of the castle. Snape caught her by the back of the neck and pressed her face to his shoulder and stroked the life back into her core, and she convulsed in messy and ungraceful waves around his fingers.

There was dirt on his face and bright white flakes of snow on his black hair and she speared her fingers through it and held on as he flipped back his opened robes and fitted himself to her, sliding in snugly and silently like a key in an oiled lock. He was still for a long moment and she could feel his chest heaving irregularly against hers. She carded his hair through her fingers, melting the snow, and he opened his eyes to look at her face, and she saw all the complexity of inappropriate joy and relief there.

Hermione locked her ankles in the small of his back and flexed all her muscles at once, a full body stretch that got every nerve singing, and Snape grunted and began to thrust. He shifted them to brace her back against a limestone block for leverage, clutching at the backs of her thighs with enough desperate pressure to leave bruises that she would still be finding a week later, in the aftermath. He rode her hard enough to hurt, hard enough to drive out the grief that had been bleeding through her skin, hard enough to make her forget to be guilty for living, if only for a little while.

The Panic Room, splintered apart like a child's dollhouse, had no magic left in its remaining walls to restrain them, and they had no more magic themselves left to expend. They were simply two people, broken down to their basest elements, starting over. Snape came silently with a flood of warmth inside her, and he didn't gasp out her name but he did rest his head against her breast while she held him and watched the gentle fall of a brief and early snow filtering down.

"Do I still remind you of her?" Hermione whispered, thinking of something he'd let slip years ago. She still didn't know who he'd been referring to, that nameless woman from his past, but somehow it still mattered.

Snape let out a long sigh against her shoulder. "Yes. But I can tell the difference."

It wasn't beautiful or the way it ought to be, but it was enough.

"What now?" Hermione asked later, straightening her robes with stiff fingers, beginning finally to feel the cold seeping in. She oddly recalled the sense memory of wringing out a cloth over a basin on this very floor, the feel of the cold water through her fingers, the washing away of blood, making everything clean again.

Snape took a long breath and let it out just as slowly. "We rebuild. We start again. Bury the dead and remember them. Remember ourselves, one day at a time."

Hermione shivered and tucked her wild hair behind her ears, feeling very young and so very old at the same time. She looked up the cracked steps that led to the battlefield above, thinking of how of the snow and the leaves must be falling to cover the dead in a blanket of red and gold and white. "I can do that."

Snape stared at her intently, his face as carved in marble as it always was but his eyes smiling, just a little. "I have no doubt of it, Miss Granger. You're too obstinate to do anything else."

Hermione put one steadying hand on the wall and one foot on the first step, and began to climb.

~end~

**Author's Note:**

> Themes include allusions to major character death, and graphic depictions of sex between consenting adults.


End file.
